This week on Thursday, 6PM, the project ‘Spieltrieb – the play in art, science and society’ will be kicked off at Goethe Institut Kraków. The project includes a one year exhibition of my new installation “Suck the Balls!” right at the Potocki Palace at Kraków’s main square (which is actually the Goethe Kraków headquarter).

The construction consists of a little ball pit, a vacuum cleaner powered pneumatic tube transport and a ball shower.

Before I went to Kraków last week to set up the machine in the beautiful historic staircase of the palace, I asked my friend and technology aficionado Günter Schulz to come over to my workshop for some beta testing.

For further video analysis, I filmed Günter executing various performance tests.
Please analyze yourself:

Huh, it really has been a while since I updated my website! But here is finally the video of the installation which I made together with the Polish artist group panGenerator. Our idea was to create a digital data storage device with unclear capacity: If you fill it up too much with data, it will explode.

Data can be entered with a keyboard. Each letter which is entered into the balloon is also spoken out loud. And you can release previeously stored data again by hitting backspace. That will spell out old information and deflate the balloon.

The installation was built within a week, so there was not much time for testing. And at the end it turned out that it is rather hard to let the balloon explode. Such a balloon can really store quite a large amount of data :) And that’s also the reason why there’s no explosion to see in the otherwise really beautiful video :(

Thanks to Poland’s National Audiovisual Institute for inviting me to collaborate with the nice folks from panGenerator!

The National Audiovisual Institute of Poland invited me and the artist collective panGenerator to make a new installation. We called it “Explosive Digital Data Storage”. You can see it (and try it out) at Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw for the next two weeks. Below is a picture of the opening and soon, I’ll publish a documentation.

Photo by Bartek Warzecha for NInA

Our cyborg workshop in Belgium last week was a huge success – now you can find the documentation about it here!

All cyborgs will be also presented at KIKK Festival, which will happen from November 7th-9th in the Theater of Namur.

Photo above: The graffiti exoskeleton. One of many exciting cyborg constructions which were built in the workshop!

My niece visited us this weekend – and she had a plan: She wanted to build a robot, because she finds robots cool. So she did:

Here’s the result. His name is “Robomobo”:

[UPDATE: Application deadline is extended until September 25th!]

I’m happy to announce that Kati and me will conduct a super duper CYBORG WORKSHOP early October in Namur/Belgium! It takes place in an old church – a fantastic venue for reaching the next level of human evolution. Another excellent reason for joining this awesome three day workshop is that it costs only 20€ including foodz & materialz!

From the official workshop website:

During the three workshop days the participants will turn themselves from regular mortals into do-it-yourself cyborgs. By inventing and constructing wearable mechanical technologies from a pool of funny materials gathered from the hardware store, we will alter the way how our bodies interact with the surrounding world. If you ever dreamed of seeing 360° without turning your head or hearing through walls, come and make your cyborg dream come true. A pile of funnels, hoses, mirrors, welding helmets, harnesses and whatever else are waiting for your creativity to take over. No previous experience is required, just a vision for the future of human kind.

KIKK organizes the Cyborg workshop together with another great workshop hosted by my good friend Julien Maire. In his workshop, you can construct a mechatronic sculpture from old scanners and printers. If you’d like to participate at either Julien’s or our workshop, you can apply until September 15th here.

We are so extraordinarily excited about the upcoming workshop that we could not resist doing some hands on research already. This resulted in two fascinating cyborg constructions – may the inspiration be with you:

The head level extender

I am not very tall. Not that I’d care too much about this, but sometimes being a bit taller would be quite handy. Like in the cinema, at concerts or when dusting the top of my bookshelf. So I built a head level extender – a wearable device, which makes me one head taller. The very lightweight construction consists of a periscope (which is easily adjustable to look up and down) and an audio elevator:

Since the Cyborg workshop will be a lot about recombining interesting materials from the hardware store (and from 1€ shops), here’s what I used to build it:

1. Large piece of mirroring polystyrol glued on foam PVC
2. Plastic funnel (upper sonic pickup)
3. Smaller piece of mirroring polystyrol glued on foam PVC
4. Custom built manual mirror adjustment knobs (foam PVC with soft blue rubber coating)
5. PVC foam frame construction
6. Driving belt and gears from an old ink-jet printer (mirror adjustment system)
7. Plastic hose (for upper sound transmission)
8. Shoe laces (for hose position adjustment)
9. Construction helmet (I cut off a lot of unnecessary plastic)
10. Still some plastic hose
11. Earmuffs (reconfigurated as stereophonic playback adaptors)

The personal rainbow generator

While I was working on my helmet, Kati came up with the idea that she’d like to have a permanent rainbow above her head. That was easy to achieve, as we had all the required materials in the basement already. The rainbow generator is a combination of an umbrella hat and a garden sprayer. The only additional thing which is required is sunlight.

Here’s the detailed material list:

1. rainbow umbrella hat
2. rainbow release nozzle
3. custom adaptor piece (soldered out of brass sheet and copper pipe)
4. hand pump (to pressurize H²O container)
5. H²O pressure container
6. rainbow strap shoulder mount
7. rainbow release button
8. decorative rainbow glitter foil on the rainbow container

When I was invited to show My Little Piece of Privacy at Sherbrooke’s Media Art Biennial Éspace [IM] Média, I decided that I had to modify the installation:

Sherbrooke’s downtown has many abandoned shop fronts. My installation was set up in one of them. And as nobody likes to stroll in roads with empty shop windows, I wanted to do this retail space a favour and help it to find a new tenant who can care about it.

[ more… ]

Brand new HOLO-magazine asked me, if I could contribute a reward for their Kickstarter campaign. I could. The outcome was this synthesizer which I built for Finnish electronic sound artist Månsteri.

I explained the device in utmost detail in front of the camera. But then I found the video a bit too long and I edited it.

You can find all information about Micro Monster Modular, now in written form, here.

I’m happy to announce that PING! Augmented Pixel is part of the new permanent exhibition of ZKM Karlsruhe. The opening is tonight.

MediaLab Katowice invited Kati Hyyppä and me to produce an installation for the Katowice Street Art Festival a few weeks ago. Since neither Kati nor me have any particular expertise in Street Art (my one and only graffiti really sucked when I looked at it the next morning), we suggested to make an installation which invites people on the street and makes professional artists out of them.

You can find the full documentation here.

Or you just watch the video: